(UNDATED) On a day too glorious to stay indoors, my wife and I sat on steps beside Harlem Meer, the manmade lake on Central Park’s far north side, and ate a nutritionally incorrect meal of fried everything.

It was wonderful just being together.

To our left, a young couple still in the roughhousing stage tossed water at each other, shrieked and hugged. To our right, young parents rocked baby to sleep in a stroller while they talked grownup talk.

All around us, in every type of configuration, men and women, parents and children, boys and girls, enjoyed the intoxication of being together on a 61-degree Sunday in full sunshine.

As we walked home, we passed a young foursome in the early stages of pairing off; multi-generation families sprawled on picnic blankets; and a couple of “advancing years” who held hands, parted easily so that we could pass, and took hands again.

For centuries, institutional theologians have been horrified by the thought that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a relationship more intimate than friendship, maybe even as intimate as husband and wife. How could the church justify celibacy for clergy and sexual repression for everyone else if Jesus, too, had shared that dimension of the human experience?

That’s not my issue. I am more intrigued by the speculation that Jesus lived a full life and that, among the dreams dashed on Calvary, was the dream of growing old together with his beloved. It makes his sacrifice all the more poignant. It makes his appearance to Mary Magdalene on Easter morning all the more inspiring.

From such speculation — and it can only be speculation — Jesus emerges as more than a grim ascetic, more than an angry prophet, more than a single-minded zealot. He emerges as a person. A person with emotions, flaws, dreams, steadfast courage, fears, a need for others and yet a comfort in solitude. He is a person who is able to imagine new realities into being, able to give up everything for love.

To build a faith on such a person, we would have to accept a discomfiting reality about humanity: that God has given us to each other — not to exploit or dominate, but to love and to cherish. We would have to see that it isn’t power or tribe or religion that defines us, but the hands we extend and the dreams we share.

To imagine such a person showing us the way to God, we would see Mary Magdalene weeping at a life interrupted. We would see the sacrifice of Jesus not as some safe intellectual construct, capable of being captured in crisp definition and stately liturgy, but as that moment we all dread, when we are wrenched away from each other — by failure, by misfortune, by life, by death — and the sunshine we hoped would last forever turns to darkness.

No more meals beside a lake. That is what went into the tomb with Jesus.

And hope restored, in a new life after loss, is what emerged from the tomb and called his beloved by name: “Mary!”

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)